Page 46 of Velvet Vaughn

She crouched, studied it from two angles without making contact, then straightened. “Can you get me a dish towel?”

Without comment, he went to the kitchen and came back with a clean one. She worked the envelope up from the floor by its edges, walked it to the kitchen island, and set it under the pendant lights.

“Gloves are in the front pocket of my bag along with a knife. Get them for me. Please,” she added, as if suddenly remembering to be polite.

He retrieved them. Anja slid the gloves on, considered the envelope for several seconds, then slit it along the top edge with the blade. She spread the sides to look inside first, then drew out the contents and laid them on the marble in a row.

Photographs. Four of them, printed on standard photo stock, shot with a long lens from a distance. The quality wasn’t amateur, and the framing wasn’t random.

The first photo showed a woman walking out of a coffee shop in bright sunlight, laughing at something on her phone, a water bottle in one hand and a canvas tote in the other. The second caught her crossing a parking lot, head down, keys in hand. In the third, she was sitting in the passenger seat of an SUV, talking to someone off-frame. The fourth was a candid shot in a grocery store, where she was reaching for something on a shelf and not looking up.

He knew the woman in every one of them.

“Chloe.” His voice came out flat and strange.

“Yeah. I know where all of these were taken. That’s a café on Kirkwood and a shop at College Mall.”

Anja took a photo of each image with her phone. Her expression was controlled, meaning she’d moved past the point where the information was alarming and into the part where it became a problem to solve.

Leo was firmly in the alarming stage. His lungs suddenly forgot how to work, and he didn’t know how to encourage them to inflate. Chloe had been going about her life in Bloomington with her canvas tote and her water bottle, and someone with a telephoto lens was making a file on her. “They know about Chloe.” His voice was a croak.

“Yes.”

“Why?” he managed. “She’s not connected to Vic. She’s not connected to any of this.”

“She’s connected to you.” Anja spoke with the directness she used when she needed him to receive something cleanly. Not unkindly. Just straight. “She’s your family. That makes her leverage. Look at the date stamp.”

Leo leaned closer. “Son of a bitch. They were taken earlier today.”

“Yes.”

He put both hands flat on the island and studied the photos. Chloe was laughing at her phone, with no idea in the world that anyone was watching her. Carefree in the parking lot, keys swinging, a perfectly ordinary afternoon.

“Someone slid this under your door, and they wanted you to come home to it. That’s a message.”

“What kind of message?”

She faced him. “They’re letting you know they know Vic contacted you and they know what you love. They want you to understand that those two things are related.”

Leo straightened up. Six years of reading rooms, people, and unsaid things beneath contract language, and the thing he felt right now had no professional framework for it. It was older and simpler and considerably less manageable than anything he’d ever navigated.

“I have to call her,” he murmured.

“Yes, but not yet.” Anja held up one hand. “Not until I check the building camera footage from tonight. I want to know who put that under your door before we do anything else.”

“Building security will have it. I’ll call them now.”

“Tell them it’s urgent and don’t tell them why.”

He had the night manager on the phone in ninety seconds. The man was cooperative and clearly accustomed to top-floor residents with specific requests at odd hours, which gave Leo a new and slightly concerning perspective on his neighbors.

He handed the phone to Anja.

She asked questions, listened, asked one more, thanked him, and handed the phone back.

“One of the security guards,” she explained. “He found it downstairs on the floor of the mail room, so he brought it up.”

Leo processed that. “Nobody broke in and slid it under the door in the dark.”